Flowers of middle spring in my Austin garden
April 14, 2024 After Texas mountain laurels and plums have dropped their fragrant blossoms, after bluebonnets and other early wildflowers have gone to messy seed, but before heat-loving salvias and skullcap and Turk’s cap get going, we enter what I call middle spring in Central Texas. It’s lush and flowery, ...
Spring in full swing in my garden
April 03, 2024 What a great time of year this is in a Central Texas garden. The days have been comfortable but not hot. The humidity is low. We’ve had a little rain but also plenty of sun. And the plants are racing with new growth and flowers. They’re feeling ...
Exploring Chanticleer’s Elevated Walkway, Serpentine, and Bulb Meadow
January 03, 2024 Chanticleer Garden’s rooster theme continues with Marcia Donahue‘s cockscomb-bamboo sculptures, which mark the entrance to the Elevated Walkway garden. This is Part 4 of my visit to Chanticleer during the Philadelphia Area Fling last September. The winding pathway spirals around a big Japanese maple, which was blushing ...
Homey fall garden at Brandywine Cottage
October 19, 2023 Tropical Storm Ophelia swept across the Philadelphia region during late September’s Philly Area Fling. But Flingers shall not be deterred! On we Flung in raincoats, ponchos, umbrellas, and waterproof shoes — or in sopping wet pants and socks. Our group arrived at plantsman and designer David L ...
October blooms brighten my garden
October 12, 2023 October! It’s the best month of the year, providing sweet relief from a Texas summer with cooler weather and rain and bringing the garden back to life. Let’s take a stroll ALL around the garden and see what there is to see. It’s oxblood lily season! These ...
Hot summer survivors and new book news
August 21, 2023 This summer, y’all. Am I right, my fellow Texas gardeners? But even with two months of surface-of-the-sun temps and zero rain, at least a few plants are happy. Like this pink-flowering mammillaria cactus that burst into silken bloom a few days after I gave it a deep ...
Surviving the record-breaking heat
July 20, 2023 Heat waves are everywhere all at once right now, and Austin too is broiling in the hottest July on record, according to KXAN. That’s saying something because last summer was incredibly hot. I felt sure, after enduring Snowpocalypse, last summer’s oven-like temps, and then February’s Arbormageddon ice ...
Fawns welcome me home
May 29, 2023 Did you notice it’s been a little quiet around here? If you follow my Instagram, you already know I joined my husband this spring on a 5-week RVing trip to see national parks in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. (Find my Instagram stories about the ...
Spring spurs spuria irises
April 07, 2023 The spuria irises have sprung! Their burnt gold, droopy-petaled flowers perch atop tall stems, surrounded by slender, sword-shaped leaves, sheltered under a crape myrtle canopy. Their distinctive color pops against a green backdrop. They glow behind mauve, fleshy ‘Fiercely Fabulous’ mangave. They make a golden filling between ...
Flowers going up and coming down
April 03, 2023 The first hummingbird appeared last weekend, zooming under the dangling red flowers of soap aloes. No surprise there. Those aloes put out quite the welcome mat for hummers. The spiderwort has had a good run — here’s a volunteer by the covered porch, looking pretty — but ...
More red trumpets!
September 13, 2022 Last week I came home from a trip to Santa Fe to find the oxblood lilies up and blazing in the back garden. Yesterday, after a weekend trip to Houston, I found a second round in fiery flower. Bonus! Oxblood lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) are a passalong — ...
Explosion of oxblood lilies and datura
September 07, 2022 I vamoosed from the Texas heat last week for the drier, cooler, high-desert climate of Santa Fe. It was a great trip, but the whole time I was away I fretted that I was missing one of my late-summer favorites at home: the eruption of oxblood lilies ...
Cindy Fillingame’s glowing, rainy-day garden
August 09, 2022 Let’s pedal on into another lovely Wisconsin garden from the Madison Fling in June, this one belonging to Cindy Fillingame. An old, three-wheeled bicycle greets you out front, a tub of yellow pansies glowing behind the seat, pink penstemon popping up through the spokes. While Austin continues ...
A sun-to-shade retreat in the garden of Rita Thomas
July 25, 2022 “The garden has been my retreat, my laboratory, and my playground,” Rita Thomas told us at the Madison Fling, a 3-day tour for gardeners on social media, held last month in and around Madison, Wisconsin. For 35 years, Rita has been playing in her Fitchburg garden, learning ...
Allen Centennial Garden on UW–Madison campus
July 16, 2022 Allen Centennial Garden, a free public garden at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, offers a pleasant garden stroll around a Queen Anne mansion. The garden was our final stop on the recent Madison Garden Bloggers Fling tour. I also made a quick visit with friends before the Fling ...
Foliage-rich pond garden: Kuster Garden at Madison Fling
July 10, 2022 We visited a number of gardens with ponds at the Garden Bloggers Fling in Madison, Wisconsin, last month. Tom Kuster, who was not a gardener at the time, inherited his pond with the house he and wife Cheryl purchased in 1990. Did the pond work its magic ...
